CULTURAL INTIMACY

[Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. 2 edition. New
York: Routledge.]

The thesis presented by Herzfeld, according to Herzfeld himself, is that “nationalism and
cultural intimacy, and conventional law and inventive disobedience, are entwined in a mutual
dependence” (14). But in order to fully understand this thesis, one must unravel each of these concepts
and relations.

First, and foremost, Herzfeld develops the concept of cultural intimacy and its relation with
nationalism. Cultural intimacy is “the recognition of those aspects of an officially shared identity that
are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their
assurance of common sociality”. Although, “associated with secrecy and embarrassment, [cultural
intimacy] may erupt into public life and collective self-representation” (7). By thinking about cultural
intimacy, Herzfeld explores what has not been seen or said in nationalistic studies: what, precisely,
makes people feel related and similar, why people “imagine” themselves as a community with shared
traits? Herzfeld argues that what insiders feel they have in common is a shared embarrassment, in
face of a foreigner, for certain characteristics of their country or their idiosyncrasy.

This is apparent in the own country or nation: I giggle thinking about Colombians
acknowledging, half amused and half embarrassed, that they are always late or that they are
particularly prone to corruption (corruption being, in fact, one of the main forms of cultural intimacy
that Herzfeld explores in the case of Greece). What seems particularly challenging is to recognize
cultural intimacy in a foreign culture, that is, to tell what makes people feel embarrassed or to see
what insiders are trying to hide from foreign judgement, but also to tell apart individual from national
embarrassment. This is only possible in a long-term commitment and engagement that produces
certain familiarity and confidence between the insider and outsider, similar to the one needed to
understand subtle jokes and puns in another language and another culture. Foregrounding ‘cultural
intimacy’ as a crucial element of nationalism is, thus, a defense of ethnographic work and evidence.
The study of what has been said to be “mere anecdote” can unveil powerful political mechanisms,
seems to argue Herzfeld with this work.

What creates cultural intimacy, as it has been said, is its hidden character (although it is never
fully hidden and oftentimes becomes part of self-representation, as previously quoted). In contrast
with it, they are public representations and discourses of nationalism. Herzfeld plays with the duality
between the public and official, on one hand, and the intimate and conceived, on the other. And that
is where the aforementioned relationship between ‘conventional law and inventive disobedience’ can
be intertwined. In each nation there is a law, but there are, as well, many parts of such law that are
not enforced. More precisely, they are sections of the law that everybody knows do not work in
practice as they were written or conventionally proclaimed. This knowledge is oftentimes a source of
external embarrassment and a crucial form of cultural intimacy. But Herzfeld further develops this
argument by claiming that it is precisely such difference between the conventional law and the
practice, or the ‘secret’ flexibility and plasticity of the law, what strengthens nationalism and national
identity, what unites the nation. In Herzfeld’s words: “Even in more peaceful times, the state

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commonly relies on a sense of unity that does not come from any official ideology or grand principle.
On the contrary, that unity seems, paradoxically, to spring from shared irreverence and defiance of
the state itself” (5). Herzfeld laughingly reverses traditional explanations of nationalism based on
power, force and honor and bases his on irreverence and shared complicities.

With the concept of cultural intimacy, Herzfeld developed the anthropology of state, thinking
about it not as a monolithic entity but as a series of institutions or relationships, more or less reified,
between humans. complicated the ideas of nation state, the collective identity par excellence, as a
reified and foreign existence to daily life. On one hand, he illuminated how social actors used the
official idioms to pursue personal or even unofficial goals and, on the other, how the state depends
on what it recognizes as unofficial to survive. Herzfeld argued as well in his book that "state
ideologies and the intimacy of everyday social life are revealingly similar, both in how they make
their claims and in what they are used to achieve" (3). “Cultural intimacy” is one of the ways in which
both realms share a rhetoric.

In fact, Herzfeld is profoundly interested in language uses in order to reveal cultural intimacy
and better understand the relationship between official idioms of nation and nationalism and the
intimate substrate of everyday practices. A concept that shows such sensibility is disemia defined as
the formal or coded tension between official self-presentation and what goes on in the privacy of
collective introspection (7) and constructed upon the term disglosia used to describe a language
divided between an official register and a more common and intimate one. In this sense, Herzfeld’s
collection of essays is an example of attentiveness to the subtle changes and intentions of language,
to the different registers, to the winks and nudges of communication, to the silences and references
and ironies.

Another concept that I would like to briefly consider, crucial to Herzfeld’s argument but also
powerful for illuminating the relationship between individuals and the State, the nation and its history
is ‘social poetics’. Simply defined as “the creative presentation of the individual self”, in this case it
encompasses the creative ways in which individuals fabricate themselves and their identity,
specifically in relationship with their nation. Some of the ways in which Herzfeld describes such
work is as the “deploying the debris of the past for present purposes” (29) or as “acts of reification”
(31) of certain parts of official and unofficial discourses as parts of themselves and what they are: “It
links the little poetics of everyday interaction with the grand dramas of official pomp and
historiography to break down illusions of scale”. (31)

If the first edition of his book was mostly concerned with nation-state, he will later clarify,
answering to some of their critics (Appadurai, 1998; Chun, 2000; Kiossev, 2002; Palumbo, 2013);
that “the nation-state, though perhaps the paramount example, is not the only unit that hides its
cultural intimacy from outsiders” (56). In this sense, cultural intimacy is assumed to be an open-ended
frame for studying how “the distinction between the public and intimate faces of identity are
negotiated” (61). Although the concept of cultural intimacy appears to be flexible enough for shifting
analytical levels, it has mainly been used to describe nation-state or ethnic national minorities
(Maddox, 2004). One of the few examples of cultural intimacy outside of this realm is Allen Chun’s
study about Taiwanese academic institutions (2000).

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Quotes, definitions and other notes.

 In this book, I explore the grounds of this defensiveness. I examine the contrasts that the
visitor to many a nation-state encounters between the presentation of the national culture—
what nationalist discourses personalize as “national character”— and the presentation of
individual selves within the intimacy of the national space. (2)
“Above all—and this is what “cultural intimacy” is all about—it is to show just how far the
nation-state depends on everything it professes to reject as illegal, informal, and indecent”
(6)

Cultural intimacy

 Cultural intimacy is the recognition of those aspects of an officially shared identity that are
considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with
their assurance of common sociality. Cultural intimacy, though associated with secrecy and
embarrassment, may erupt into public life and collective self-representation (7)-
Embarrassment, rueful self-recognition: these are the key markers of what cultural intimacy
is all about. (11) cultural intimacy is, above all, familiarity with perceived social flaws that
offer culturally persuasive explanations of apparent deviations from the public interest (14).
It expresses in more directly political terms the dynamic that I had earlier sought to clarify
through the more formalistic notion of disemia—the formal or coded tension between official
self-presentation and what goes on in the privacy of collective introspection. While the
official aspect is a legitimate (and indeed necessary) object of ethnographic analysis, the
intimacy it masks is, as I have indicated, the subject of a deep sense of cultural and political
vulnerability. (19) National embarrassment can become the ironic basis of intimacy and
affection, a fellowship of the flawed, within the private spaces of the national culture. (34)

 Social poetics= creative presentation of the individual self / A social poetics recognizes that
people deploy the debris of the past for all kinds of present purposes (29) Social poetics is
about these acts of reification—the play through which people try to turn transient advantage,
a quick grasp of some official discursive or symbolic form, into a permanent condition of
social advancement. It links the little poetics of everyday interaction with the grand dramas
of official pomp and historiography to break down illusions of scale. (31)
Stereotypes
 social life consists of processes of reification and essentialism as well as challenges to these
processes (32)
 Structural nostalgia= idealized image of the past as perfectly balanced and harmonious
 Arguments about the validity of anthropological scholarship take on the character of defenses
put up by majority or elite forces against the violation of cultural intimacy. (2)
 Rise of nationalism: Uncomfortable though many anthropologists are with the nastier sides
of nationalism, their relevance in discussions of world affairs has been fed by the expansions

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 of nationalism’s unexpected and often hateful doctrines (4).
 “Even in more peaceful times, the state commonly relies on a sense of unity that does not
come from any official ideology or grand principle. On the contrary, that unity seems,
paradoxically, to spring from shared irreverence and defiance of the state itself” (5)

Nudge and wink.

 Language: “Like social actors who use “the law” to legitimize self-interested actions, the
state, conversely, uses a language of kin, family, and body to lend immediacy to its
pronouncements. It thereby converts revolution into conformity, represents ethnic cleansing
as national consensus and cultural homogeneity, and recasts the sordid terrors of emergence
into a seductive immortality. Because it is grounded in an idiom of social immediacy,
however, this historical streamlining never quite succeeds in concealing a residual sense of
contradiction. That sense may provide opportunities for critique, and eternal truths can have
surprisingly short lives” (6)

Language

 Disglosia: a situation in which a national language is split between two “registers” or social
dialects: a formal and often deliberately archaic idiom used mostly for official purposes, and
the ordinary speech of everyday life (C. Ferguson 1959) (20)
 my thesis that nationalism and cultural intimacy, and conventional law and inventive
disobedience, are entwined in a mutual dependence (14)
 cultural force of cynicism (15)
 In my second example, from New Zealand, some Maori traced their national origins to the
Jews who escaped from Egypt; this not only furnished a parable of deliverance from
subjugation but also, by transforming analogy into genealogy, relegated the colonial Christian
mission- aries to the status of “younger brothers” (Schwimmer 1990: 29–31). (19)

On Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

 Anderson’s imagined community: This insistent parallelism with a community of familiar

faces is the basis of Anderson’s (1991) image of the nationalist goal as an “imagined
community.” But this justly celebrated formulation requires at least two modifications. First,
the metonymic extension of “those we know” to include a huge population is not confined to
nation-states; they are not the only imagined communities.5 Perhaps people everywhere use
the familiar building blocks of body, family, and kinship to make sense of larger entities. This
may indeed be the most purely social demonstration of Fernandez’s (1974) renowned
definition of metaphor as “the predication of a sign upon an inchoate subject.” In other words,
as a device for understanding what is simply too big for us to fathom except by analogy.
The second modification of Anderson’s thesis concerns its top-down formulation. That
Imagined Communities has been warmly received by most anthropologists is largely due to
its recognition that understanding the appeal of nationalism requires us to ask how and why

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 individual citizens respond to it. Why should people be willing to die for a formal abstraction?
Sometimes, as conscripts, or even as taxpayers, for example, they may feel that they have no
real choice. But still the question remains: why the un-coerced enthusiasm that this form of
self-sacrifice often seems to inspire? Anderson took a major step forward by pointing out that
nationalism offered citizens a means of converting their own deaths into a shared immortality.
But he does not tell us why this works so well and so often, nor does he tell us whether the
actions of the converted exert a reciprocal effect on the cultural form of the evolving nation-
state. […] Neither Anderson nor Billig, enormous advances on earlier scholarship though
their analyses are, addresses the role of collective embarrassment as an important source of
national loyalty, both in defending the nation’s reputation and in finding a guilty but
pleasurable commonality within

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Appadurai, Arjun (1988) How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary

India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30:3–24.

 Chun, Allen (2000) From Text to Context: How Anthropology Makes Its Subject. Cultural
Anthropology 15:570–95.

 Kiossev, Alexander (2002) The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identifications, Acts of
Identifications. In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed.
Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, 165–90. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
 Maddox, Richard F. (2004) Intimacy and Hegemony in the New Europe: The Politics of
Culture at Seville’s Universal Exposition. In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and
Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture. Ed. Andrew Shryock. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 131–54.
 Palumbo, Berardino (2013) A Baron, Some Guides, and a Few Ephebic Boys: Cultural
Intimacy, Sexuality, and Heritage in Sicily. Anthropological Quarterly 86: 1087–118.